Caktus Blog

Back in March, at PyCon 2013, the PSF provided each attendee with a Raspberry Pi, a tiny credit-card sized computer meant to be paired with the Python programming language. The power and portability of the Raspberry Pi has stimulated an explosion of interest among hobbyists and educators. Their uses seem to be limited only by our collective imagination.

UPDATE: Read a newer blog post on this topic.

The new custom user model configuration that arrived in Django makes it relatively straightforward to swap in your own model for the Django user model. In most cases, Django's built-in User model works just fine, but there are times when certain limitations (such as the length of the email field) require a custom user model to be installed. If you're starting out with a custom user model, setup and configuration are relatively straightforward, but if you need to migrate an existing legacy project (e.g., one that started out in Django 1.4 or earlier), there are a few gotchas that you might run into. We did this recently for one of our larger, long-term client projects at Caktus, and here's an outline of how we'd recommend tackling this issue:

On Wednesday, Mark and Julia are teaming up to deliver their talk "Developers + Designers: Collaborating on your Open Source project " at OSCON 2013. We’re thrilled that their talk got accepted and know that they have a lot to contribute to the Open Source conversation which too often lacks the voice of designers. Julia and Mark will be discussing how it is important to start collaborating early on your ideas before writing code. We’re happy to have such adept developers and designers here at Caktus pushing each other to work outside of their strict job titles and collaborate to build projects that couldn’t be built anywhere else. If you are at OSCON this week, stop by and hear Mark and Julia’s talk. Or, if you miss their talk, they will be around all week and are excited about meeting new people.

When testing a Django application you often need to populate the test database with some sample data. The standard Django TestCase has support for fixture loading but there are a number of problems with using fixtures:

Do your mornings usually consist of reading design blogs and drinking coffee? Are you obsessive about fonts? Are you constantly seeking out new inspiration to make your designs better? As a Front-End Developer + Designer at Caktus, you’ll be able to put your passion for design and development to work by creating beautiful designs for complex websites. You will work closely with clients to bring their visions to life and help lead the branding and design process. Our designers take ownership of the user experience and design process from the beginning and collaborate with our development team to implement the vision. You should be passionate about the open source community and the philosophy behind it. If you’re interested in becoming part of and contributing to a creative, dynamic team, here’s an idea of what you’ll do:

[Caktus is proud to be a part of the launch of the]{style=“color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-style:normal;”} PyCon 2014 in Montreal[ website. We were delighted to be selected as this year’s partner for software development and brand updates. In the past, we've enjoyed working with the ]{style=“color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-style:normal;”}Python Software Foundation[ as a collaborator for the ]{style=“color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-style:normal;”}Raspberry.io[ branding and development and are excited to help out with the PyCon website.]{style=“color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-style:normal;”}

If you’ve ever written a test for a view or model with associated uploaded files you might have noticed a small problem with those files hanging around after the tests are complete. Since version 1.3, Django won’t delete the files associated with your model instances when they are deleted. Some work-arounds for this issue involve writing a custom delete for your model or using a post_delete signal handler. But even with those in place the files would not be deleted during tests because the model instances are not explicitly deleted at the end of the test case. Instead, Django simply rolls back the transaction and the delete method is never called nor are the signals fired. This can be quite an annoyance when running the tests repeatedly and watching your MEDIA_ROOT (or worse your S3 bucket) fill up with garbage data. More than annoyance, this introduces something you always want to avoid in unittests: global state.

This blog post is about ways of doing things in your Django app, and pitfalls to avoid, so your app is easier to plug in to other sites.

[As part of the Fulbright Enrichment [From Lab to Market]{style=“font-style: italic;”} seminar, Caktus hosted 16 Fulbright students from around the world on Wednesday, May 29th. The participants were engineering and science students with an interest in Public Health and Mobile Health innovation.]{#docs-internal-guid–15dfdd3-f622-293e-da9c-340d4c5b5818}

We had our 2nd ShipIt Day at Caktus last week. ShipIt (coined by Atlassian), in case you don’t know, is an exercise that allows your team to work on alternative projects in a 24-hour hackathon. We brainstorm ideas related to Caktus, break into small groups and try to build a project by the end of the day on Friday. It’s a lot of fun and provides an opportunity to work on internal tools, try something new and collaborate together. \